Membership solutions

Membership website development designed around the renewal

Paid communities, content libraries and associations all depend on recurring billing and clear access rules. We build both on WordPress or a custom platform, and test what happens when a payment fails.

  • 500+ WordPress projects to date
  • Billing and access tested together
  • Your members, your data
Get a free quote See our work
What is included
  • Levels and access rules
  • Recurring billing
  • Failed-payment recovery
  • Onboarding and member area
  • Content protection
  • Retention reporting
Get a free quote Reply within one business day. NDA on request.
The problem

Why membership sites lose revenue quietly

Selling a membership is easy to describe: people pay every month or year and get something others do not. Running one raises harder questions. What exactly does each level include? What happens the day a card is declined, or a member downgrades halfway through a term? How does a new member find the good material in the first ten minutes instead of drifting away?

We build membership and subscription sites for creators with a paid library, for communities with discussion and events, and for associations with member categories, renewals and directories. Most of them run well on WordPress membership plugins. Some need a custom application because the access rules or the billing model are unusual. Either way the project starts with a table of levels, prices, access and billing events, long before any design.

  • Failed payments become silent cancellations

    A card expires, the renewal fails and the member is removed or, worse, keeps access for months. Nobody emails them, nobody retries the charge, and the loss only shows up in the quarterly numbers.

  • Access rules nobody can explain

    Levels, bundles, legacy plans and one-off exceptions have piled up. Support cannot say why one member sees a page and another does not, and every new offer risks opening content to the wrong people.

  • New members never get started

    People pay, land on a generic account page and do not know where to begin. They use nothing in the first week and cancel before the second charge.

  • The platform owns the relationship

    On a hosted community or creator platform the member list, the billing and the rules belong to someone else. Exporting members with their subscriptions intact turns out to be harder than joining was.

What we do

What a membership platform has to do well

Six parts decide whether members stay and keep paying. We build them as one system, so billing and access always tell the same story.

Levels and access rules

Plans, tiers, add-ons and group memberships mapped to pages, posts, downloads, courses and forums, with drip schedules and rules a non-developer can read and change.

Recurring billing

Monthly, annual and lifetime plans, trials, coupons, upgrades with proration, taxes and invoices through Stripe or PayPal, driven by webhooks so the site agrees with the gateway.

Failed-payment recovery

Automatic retries, a sequence of reminder emails, a grace period before access changes and a one-click page to update the card, all logged per member.

Onboarding and member area

A welcome flow that asks a few useful questions and points each member to a first win, plus a dashboard that shows what is new since their last visit.

Content protection

Server-side checks on pages, feeds, search results and file URLs, expiring download links and protected video embeds, so paid material is not one shared link away.

Retention reporting

Active members, new joins, cancellations and failed renewals by plan and cohort, plus the reasons collected in the cancel flow, so you can see which lever to pull.

Typical projects

Membership models we build

01

A paid content library

Articles, videos, templates or research behind a paywall, with free previews for search engines, tiered access, and a clean upgrade path from newsletter reader to subscriber.

02

A private community

Member profiles, discussion spaces, events and direct messages on WordPress with BuddyBoss or in a custom app, with paid access managed by the same billing system as the content.

03

An association or professional body

Member categories with different dues, annual renewal cycles, invoices for organizations, a searchable member directory, committee areas and renewal reminders that go out on schedule.

04

A subscription around a service or tool

Plans that gate features or usage instead of pages, with seats for teams, an account owner who manages billing, and usage limits enforced inside the application.

In depth

Deciding how to build it and what to launch with

Hosted platform, WordPress or custom

Hosted creator and community platforms are quick to start and fine while your offer matches their model. The trade is control: their checkout, their fees, their limits on what a level can contain, and a migration project if you leave. WordPress with a membership plugin such as MemberPress, Paid Memberships Pro or WooCommerce Memberships gives you ownership of members and content, strong publishing tools and many integrations. It suits most content libraries, communities and associations. A custom build, usually on Laravel, is worth it when membership is wrapped around an application: usage-based plans, seats and roles inside customer accounts, or eligibility checked against another system. A useful test: if your offer fits a table of levels against content, a plugin will handle it. If the table needs columns such as usage this month or seats taken, you are describing an application.

Write the billing events down first

Before choosing a plugin we list every event and what it does to access: signup, trial end, renewal, failed renewal, successful retry, upgrade, downgrade, pause, cancellation, refund, chargeback, expiry. For each one we ask three things. Does access change now or at the end of the paid period? Which email goes out? What does the member see? Most broken membership sites skipped this step. The table also shows quickly whether a plugin covers your model or needs custom code.

Treat failed payments as a designed flow

Some of your cancellations will be involuntary: an expired card, a bank decline, a replaced card number. The gateway can retry, and the site must react correctly to each webhook, keep access during a grace period and make updating a card painless. We test this with gateway test cards and simulated renewals instead of waiting for the first real decline.

Protection that matches the value

Hiding a menu item is not protection. Content has to be checked on the server wherever it can leak: REST API responses, RSS feeds, site search, sitemaps, cached pages and direct file URLs. Video belongs on a host that restricts embedding to your domain. We also decide with you what stays public, because a fully locked site gives search engines nothing to rank.

A first release that can renew

Launch needs the level table implemented, checkout, the welcome flow, protected content, account self-service and the failed-payment sequence. A discussion space built with WordPress community tools, a mobile app and gamification can follow. Do not go live before one full renewal cycle has been simulated end to end. After launch, build the churn levers your reports point to: an annual plan offered at the right moment, a pause option next to cancel, a cancel flow that asks why and offers a downgrade, and a win-back email when a lapsed card was the only reason someone left.

Process

From level table to first renewal

  1. 1

    Offer and level table

    In a free consultation we map your levels, prices, what each one opens and every billing event. Gaps in the offer show up here, cheaply.

  2. 2

    Platform choice and quote

    We recommend a hosted tool, a WordPress plugin stack or a custom build, explain why, and quote the first release with milestones.

  3. 3

    Build in test mode

    Checkout, access rules, member area and emails are built on a private staging copy, with the payment gateway switched to test mode.

  4. 4

    Simulate a full cycle

    Test members join, renew, fail, recover, upgrade, downgrade and cancel. We compare the site, the gateway and the email log after each event.

  5. 5

    Import and launch

    Existing members and active subscriptions are moved where the gateway allows it, then we go live and watch the first real renewals.

Deliverables

What your membership team keeps after launch

  • A level and billing-event table your support team can use
  • A tested failed-payment and card-update sequence
  • Member data and subscriptions in accounts you control
  • Protection checked on feeds, search and file links
  • A retention report by plan and signup cohort
FAQ

Membership site questions, answered

Which membership plugin should we use?
There is no single right one. The choice depends on your billing model, how content is organized and what else the site does. A store that adds memberships points one way, a publisher with tiers another. We compare two or three candidates against your level table and recommend one with reasons.
Can we move members from a hosted platform without making them pay again?
Often, yes. If payments run through your own Stripe account, saved payment methods can usually stay in place and we rebuild the subscriptions around them. PayPal subscriptions and platform-owned payment accounts are harder and may need members to re-enter details. We check this before promising anything.
What happens when a renewal payment fails?
The gateway retries on a schedule, the member gets a short series of emails with a link to update the card, and access continues through a grace period you choose. If recovery fails, the plan ends cleanly and the member can rejoin later without a duplicate account.
How do you stop members sharing logins or downloading everything?
No site can stop it entirely, and we will not pretend otherwise. We limit concurrent sessions, expire download links, restrict video embedding to your domain and flag unusual download patterns. The aim is to make sharing inconvenient without punishing honest members.
Can a membership site also run courses, events or a store?
Yes. Courses, event tickets and products can all be tied to the same member account and billing. The care is in the rules: whether a level includes a course, discounts a ticket or simply allows the purchase. Those go into the level table before anything is built.
Do members need a mobile app?
Rarely at launch. A responsive member area covers most use, and communities with daily activity are the usual exception. When it is justified we build a cross-platform app that signs in with the same account and respects the same access rules.
What does running the site involve after launch?
Someone answers billing questions, publishes content and watches the failed-payment and cancellation reports. On the technical side, plugins or packages need updates tested on staging. You can run this yourselves with the admin guide, or hand it to us on a monthly maintenance plan.
Related

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Show us your membership offer

Send your levels, prices and the platform you use now, if any. A developer who has built billing and access rules before will reply within one business day with questions and a free quote.

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